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The Interdependence of Factors Basic to the Evolution of Culture

Luther Lee Bernard
Cornell University

I. The evolution of culture
may be separated into three general stages, those of (1) the lowest animal
types, (2) median animal types, and (3) the higher animals. The first stage has
no culture and the second stage but little. The last stage includes the
anthropoids and man. The human division embraces savage, barbarian, and
civilized types of culture. II. Under each of these periods or stages are
considered nine different factors which influence or determine culture, as
follows: (1) gross organic structure, (2) neural organization, (3) language
symbolisms, (4) the processes of thinking involved, (4) the phases of invention
utilized, (6) the types of environment operative, (7) the types of adjustment
functioning, (8) the objectives sought in adjustment, and (9) resulting types of
social organization.

The history of science shows that there have been a great many empirical
attempts to bring together the facts of history into some condensed
classificatory scheme displaying the steps or stages of the development of human
institutions as a means to the further interpretation of human history.
Sometimes the empirical classifications have been helped out by more or less
crude attempts to use the findings of the mental and social sciences, or
philosophies, to construct more complete systems of classifications to be used
as norms for the measurement of historic movements and for the characterization
of contemporaneous phases of culture. These attempts have for the most part
belonged to what is known as the

(
178) "philosophy of history." The disgrace into which the old philosophy of
history fell was not due to the fact that its speculations were regarded as
aside from the point. They were very much to the point, and the conclusions
drawn from them were eagerly seized upon as norms of interpretation. Their fault
was that there were not sufficient data, either from history or from the social
and mental sciences, with which adequately to generalize over such wide temporal
and spatial reaches of human behavior. There was need of much preliminary work
of fact-gathering and generalizing, not only in history, but also in biology and
psychology and in the social sciences, to say nothing of geology and the older
sciences, before there could be adequate super-generalizations about the whole
course of cultural development. Yet so necessary were some such generalizations
felt to be that they have never ceased to be made and used, despite the scorn of
the exclusively fact-gathering types of historians and of the social scientists
with an administrative bent. Even
these scientists recognize in practice, if not in theory, the homely
truth that a poor generalization is better than no generalization, because it
opens the way through constructive criticism for a better one (7).[1]

The present essay is not an attempt in the field of the philosophy of
history, but rather in the field of social psychology, which is concerned with
the psycho-social mechanisms and patterns of the adjustment behavior of people
living in functional contact with one another. Social psychology is a derivative
science—as indeed, for that matter, are all sciences—and it is dependent for
data used in its generalizations in part upon all of the mental and social
sciences. Almost from the time of its advent as a separate science it has been
compelled to use the methods of borrowing and of projective synthetic logic or
thinking in order to assemble and generalize the data which it has required for
use as a means of interpreting collective human behavior in its widest
relationships. The present attempt at the assemblage and correlation of material
relative to individual and collective behavior from the several branches of
related sciences of behavior is partly empirical and partly projective.

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179)

In other articles (5, 10, 11) and books (8, 9) I have attempted to indicate
the apparent line of development of man's inner behavior pattern integration and
of the environments which were operative as stimuli sources for the control of
this behavior and of the inventions which served to transform the latter. It is
the purpose of this article to bring into logical correlation these three
factors and others, such as language, the dominant forms of the organism, types
of responses and objectives in the adjustment situation, and the forms of social
organization, in an effort to show how they have influenced one another in
producing the total cultural complex of our civilization. Of course this
correlation is not an easy task in view of our present knowledge, but the need
of some such schematic presentation is, from the standpoint of the sociologist
and the social psychologist, so great that it seems worth while to risk the
accompanying tentative diagram and its explanation.

As pointed out elsewhere (8, 9, 11) man has climbed the stairway of
civilization or increasing acculturization over the successive behavior steps of
instinct, overt and internal habit mechanisms, and vocal and written language,
arriving finally in the plane of a scientific technique for the formulation and
control of behavior, individual and collective. But the details of the
adjustments which he worked out in his thinking and in his inventive responses
to his environment, actually creating the most important aspects of that
environment, without being adequately aware of the significance of the
interrelated processes as a whole, have never been brought together at any one
time.[2]
The chart here presented
attempts to do this in an incomplete and schematic manner. The assumption back
of the organization of the chart is that there is a close functional correlation
between the stages of development of animal types; their structure and
life-periods and motility; the sort of behavior patterns or mechanisms at their
disposal; the kinds of language symbolism they possess for the objectification
and communication of their inner behavior tendencies or thought

(
180) processes; the types of invention of which they are capable as means to
the modification of their adjustments to environment and thereby to the
modification and creation of environments to serve in turn as controls over
their adjustment responses; the objectives which they set up in adjustment; and
the types of social organization in which they live. Each of these factors has
at some time in the process of cultural evolution reacted back upon the others,
and each is in some degree the product of the others. The advantage of seeing
the cultural development process as a whole is self-evident, since only thus can
we gain a true perspective of the functioning and development of each phase, and
of the organisms—including their personalities and collective behavior—who are
the center and carriers of the cultural process. Only a bare outline of the
process of functional interrelationships of these factors can now be offered,
partly because the minor details are not adequately known and partly because
they are seemingly so diverse and complicated that it is difficult or impossible
to generalize them in any simple way for a wide range of territory.

I. In a sense the lowest stage of interrelated development presented in the
diagram—the one centering about the instinctive behavior processes—is somewhat
hypothetical. It may be questioned whether the behavior of even the lowest
animal forms is mediated wholly on the basis of instinctive patterns. But
hypothetically, and perhaps actually, the assumption offers a good
starting-point without in any way invalidating the conclusions regarding the
course of development. Among the lowest animals simple structures selected in
conformity to a relatively constant natural environment (inanimate and animate)
require little or no modification of behavior patterns , in order to make
effective adjustments to the simple scheme of feeding and reproducing which
constitutes practically the whole gamut of their behavior. There is, of course,
no language in the sense of purposive communication among such forms; nor, so
far as we know, any conscious processes of any sort. There is therefore no
projection of adjustment ends. All responses to the natural environment, which
was originally the only environment stimulating them, are comparatively
stereotyped. Their organic structures, including the nervous system (where it
exists), are too

CHART 1 [Editors' note: the chart is too large to reproduce well as HTML.
An Acrobat file is available by clicking
here]

(
181) simple to permit of any but the slightest and most superficial
variations of response. Yet even here, if we except the very lowest forms
without nervous systems, are present the elements of structure and behavior out
of which in more advanced types are elaborated the forms of acquired
neuro-psychic technique and out of which language is developed. The total. overt
behavior responses —there are no partial or substitute symbolic ones—serve to
stimulate responses in other organisms, and this, as we shall see, is the
primitive basis of language.

II. It is the median animal types, both invertebrates and vertebrates, but
distinctly preanthropoid, which cannot make all of their adjustments on an
instinctive basis and therefore are compelled to develop differential or
acquired behavior patterns. Their habit mechanisms are of the overt type. That
is, they are initiated by external or environmental situations and the responses
are total overt responses. These acquired adjustment patterns of course utilize
the neural mechanisms, but they are not initiated by them. The fact that they
are acquired responses means that the old instinct mechanisms are modified by
the new requirements of adjustment to the environment or pressures from without.
The factors compelling new types of adjustment and therefore a modification of
behavior patterns are partly internal and partly external. The longer
life-period is the result of internal biochemical changes in the germ plasm or
at least in the continuous integrations of the constituent protoplasms. This
change was most probably initiated by some change, possibly major, possibly
minor, in the environment. Other environmental changes, some of them
cataclysmic, and some continuous and incremential, some of cosmic and some of
terrestrial origin, some chemical and others physical, may be said to account in
the last analysis for the internal structural changes. The world of life and the
world-environing life have always been dynamic, and the effects of changes in
environment are inevitably reflected in the structures of organisms.

The lengthening of the life-period increased markedly the number and
complexity of adjustments which it was necessary for the animal to make to a
changing environment. The lower animals which make their adjustments on the
basis of instinct either lived

(
182) through a single season or a portion of it, or in a medium, such as
water or the earth, which possessed an equable temperature, or they lived in a
climate without marked seasonal variations. In some other cases animals which
survived a marked change of seasons found refuge in an instinctive metamorphosis
or in a change from one medium, e.g., the air, to another medium, as the earth
or water, or vice versa. In other cases, if one favored individual of a species
of insect or shellfish producing millions of eggs could by some lucky accident
survive where thousands or millions perished, this was sufficient to perpetuate
the type. But the higher type of animal, of which but relatively a few
individuals were produced, living through a number of seasons and possessed of
locomotory apparatus which brought its members in contact with many different
environmental situations in rapid succession, must find some better method of
meeting a highly complex and variable environment than that provided by
instincts. Its expanding and increasingly flexible nervous system, involving the
growth of ganglia and a cortex with associational neurons, gave it this power of
making differential or acquired responses. The increasing development and
specialization of sense organs are not the smallest factors in complicating the
responsiveness of this median type of organism to its environments. They not
only greatly differentiate the organism's effective environment but, by the same
token, they increase its powers of making differentiated and acquired
adjustments to it.

Of course there is a wide spread in complexity of structure between the lower
and the higher types of habit-forming animals below the anthropoid forms. It
would require a book instead of a brief article to set forth all of the steps in
development of overt habit technique within this general type, even if adequate
information were available. But the general processes and principles may be
illustrated from our highly generalized classification. The development of inner
structural changes as stated, presumably in direct or indirect response to
changes in the environment, not only requires a modification of the adjustment
responses of the organism to its environment; it results secondarily in a
modification of the environment itself. This modification of environment
occurring

(
183) through the agency of the animals below man is of course relatively
slight and slow. But even in this second general stage of development outlined
in our classification there are signs of it. Elsewhere (s) I have shown that the
transformation of the natural inorganic and organic environments by men produces
physico-social and biosocial environments. These transformed natural
environments become social by induction (g). That is, they become necessary
links in the social adjustments of men by whom they are created or utilized.
Thus any part of nature which is used by man becomes social in this secondary or
derivative sense. Such specific transformations of the inorganic and organic
environments by man are called "inventions" or the "results of training."

Perhaps we should not speak of inventions at this level of response of the
organism to its environment. The method of the response is wholly that of trial
and error, and of the crudest type, when it is not still instinctive.
Consciousness is probably limited to vague perceptions, except possibly among
some of the higher mammals, and there is no recognition of the meaning of the
adjustment process by the organism, nor has it any capacity for purposive
thinking or for projection or foresight of ends in adjustment. It follows only
the most immediate hedonic urges. Yet there are simple unintended modifications
of the environment such as changes in the form of the nests and dens
constructed, or in the method of taking food, of defense and escape from danger,
and the like. Such modifications perhaps are not inventions, but they certainly
are the prototypes of later empirical inventions in the same fields. In the
field of invention, as in that of language, it must be clear, there is no break
between the behavior or the products of behavior which are and are not of the
accepted category. Where we begin to apply the term "language" or "invention" is
a more or less arbitrary matter, depending in the main upon our preconceptions
regarding what constitutes the category. In these cases it is usually considered
that some consciousness of purpose or at least of the significance of the
adjustment secured by the employment of the behavior is necessary to constitute
it invention or language. But this is really an artificial distinction or
requirement when we consider

(
184) that from a behavioristic standpoint the mechanisms and the results
attained differ on the two sides of the arbitrary dividing-lines only in the
degree of their complexity.

Here, as later, total overt responses, partial responses, emotional
expression, cries and other sounds in one organism function as stimuli to
initiate like or correlated responses in other organisms, although there is no
consciousness of the meaning of these responses. For that matter, there is but
little consciousness of the meaning of language among the lowest savages. Their
responses to language forms are for the most part merely simple and unreflective
conditioned responses. Gestures, outside of some mainly instinctive signs of the
major emotions, are but slightly developed in this stage, and response to
gestures is on the same rudimentary plane. The senses are of course much more
highly specialized, particularly among the land vertebrates and mammals, in whom
the tactual and higher exteroceptive senses tend to reach their maxi-mum
development.

Although the animals later domesticated by man do not undergo the same
changes in internal structure and do not acquire the power of making internal
inhibitions of total overt responses or of making significant inventions which
transform their environment, they do come in contact, mainly indirectly, with
the environments which man in the fourth and fifth stages creates. Thus they
develop, under his guidance, a much higher degree of overt habit modification
than would be possible without human aid in the second stage of development here
discussed. They also develop a responsiveness to language which would be
impossible without the aid of man. Under the stimulus of such language
communication they learn to respond and entreat or threaten with a gesture
language which is largely acquired and appears almost to have in it an element
of the purposive.

III. The transition stage is of course the border territory for what I have
called the "median animal stage" and the "lower human stage," which includes the
lowest savage types. Thus it embraces the prehuman anthropoids and the scarcely
human types of man himself. This, like the other early stages of animal develop-

(
185) -ment, is conglomerate and incompletely defined. But it is the period
of development in which the overt initiation of habit patterns is beginning to
be definitely supplemented by the internal initiation and modification of
acquired adjustment behavior and the direct or total overt adjustment response
begins to give way to preliminary internal adjustment. Memory images or neural
sets of such definiteness are stored up in the inner or neuro-psychic technique
that the dispositions and impulses which they represent occasionally, or perhaps
frequently, inhibit and transform the overtly initiated neural modifications.
This change in the method of habit formation, now beginning to be introduced, is
destined in future stages of development to become all important in the social
behavior of animals and to give to the human type, in which it develops
especially, dominance over all other animal types. It, as we shall see, accounts
for the rise, and in large part for the continued progress, of civilization.

But this new development in the method of forming habits does not occur
without reference to internal and external non-neural changes and corresponding
modifications in the environments. The anthropoid animals are characterized by
four striking developments in internal structure. They are in this period
developing an upright position which gives them a better command of the details
of their environment and distinctly a superior visual orientation with reference
to it. The sense organs are already practically completed so far as their
general mechanisms are concerned. The next step in orientation comes with the
development of better mechanisms for the utilization of these sense organs in
the orientation process. The upright position also frees the hands from use in
locomotion for more intensive application to the problems of sensory orientation
and to the manipulation of the environment. The hand becomes specialized in this
stage as a fine instrument of general adaptation to the physical environment;
and this specialization makes possible the beginning of the transformation in
earnest of the natural environment into a physico-social environment.

The extension of the use of the senses is also helped out on the more
internal side. There is a correlated development of the fore-

(
186) -brain, both in the size and number of the neural processes in the
cortex which function in the process of organizing internally the acquired
adjustment patterns and also in their increased flexibility. This rapid
development of the forebrain in this stage, and even later, is of the greatest
significance for the new habit-adjustment processes. It probably springs largely
from the fact that the upright position and the differentiated hands have
greatly complicated the problems of the adjustment of the organism to its
environment. A larger and more flexible forebrain is necessary to receive and
organize the sensory processes which come in and send out transformed responses
other than instinctive ones to adjust the organism to the new contacts initiated
by the hands and by the new sensory mechanisms arising from the upright
position. The speed and range of locomotion and the facilities for defense and
the exploitation of the food resources of the environment are also increased by
the outer bodily changes; and there must be an internal change in the forebrain
to correspond to these changes in overt behavior and to take care of the
problems they bring, and even to initiate modifications in the overt responses
which will be more effective as means to adjustment.

Another significant factor in increasing the complexity of adjustment by
making it in some degree co-operative or coadaptive among the anthropoid and
early human animals is the introduction of definite early forms of language.
There is some increase in the efficiency of the vocalizing apparatus, and
vocal cries approach more closely to the holophrastic content of early human
language. The major emotional attitudes are undoubtedly clearly communicated in
this stage of development, but apparently there is no intellectual content to
language, at least before man appears. The freeing of the hands largely from
locomotion also makes it possible for them to assume a language function through
the development of gestures. Although the highest form of gesture language
undoubtedly developed after the appearance of verbal language, there is no
sufficient reason for supposing that there were not forms of manual
gestures of considerable importance supplementing in this stage the older
pantomimic and total overt response stimuli which are the prototypes of gesture
language as we know it.

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187)

The large development of gesture language at this time undoubtedly arose from
the fact that the increasing complexity of the adjustments to environment
demanded of the organism, and the better mechanisms of the forebrain, which
permitted the development of internal inhibitions or the initiation of
modifications of habit patterns from within, rendered it impossible for the
organism to make total overt responses to environment in the same proportion of
cases as formerly. "Life" had become too complex for the organism to act out its
behavior completely. More things had to be settled within, in the more complex
forebrain. This meant the inhibition of many overt adjustments already begun,
especially of the hands, and even of all parts of the body. These partial or
abortive responses are the chief content of early gestures. They serve to set up
in the observing organism (if it also has had the experience of making like
gestures) the same neuro-psychic processes as those which produced them by
inhibition in the organism making the gestures (9). In this way there is a
communication of attitudes, just as in the case of response to cries, without
the necessity of total overt response. This transference of emotional attitudes
through gestures and cries is the prototype of the communication of thought,
which is for us perhaps the main function of language.

Sensory differentiation of the environment through perception is well under
way in this stage, but as yet perceptions lack the definiteness which comes with
their conditioning by verbal symbols and the naming of objects. Words have not
yet been invented. Consequently there is no abstract thinking. Likewise,
thinking with regard to future adjustments is practically non-existent, even
among the earliest men. Adjustment responses are still of the trial-and-error
type, where they are above the instinctive level. But a tendency is manifest to
transfer these to a neuro-psychic basis through the means of internal
inhibitions and organization. In so far as there may be said to be any
appreciation of objectives in adjustment, the process is perceptually vague and
the motives came from the present dynamic organization of the organism rather
than from any definite projection of future satisfactions. The motives are
themselves of the lowest and most primary hedonic satisfactions.

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188)

Inventions have begun, but on the lowest empirical basis. There cannot be
said to be any foresight of their application, even among the low human types.
The inventions are simple and accidental, but once established in habit, which
is now partly of the nature of internal response, they persist as long as they
prove immediately useful. But there is not enough internal or mental behavior
organization to carry an invention over any considerable period of time without
constant utilization, certainly not from one generation to another. It is very
probable that many of the simpler physical and social inventions were made and
lost or forgotten in this way a number of times through a period of millennia or
possibly of hundreds of thousands of years. The inventions themselves were in
the nature of simple transformations of physical objects into slightly modified
forms or the use of stones, sticks, etc., in conjunction with the hand or other
organs of the body to aid in the procuring of food or in the defense against
enemies. In other cases they were habit modifications of behavior made to serve
in mutual response situations which thus came to be collective-behavior patterns
or crude social inventions. The physical inventions in this period could not
have been more complex than the simplest extensions of the bodily organs by the
adoption of crude tools and weapons seized from nature. The social inventions
were likewise but extensions of instinctive or habitual behavior into collective
behavior, such as co-operative attack upon or defense against enemies. Such
inventions were not purposive, nor were the inventors aware that they had made
inventions as such. They had not yet invented the language symbols with which to
objectify their inventive experiences in definite symbolic behavior
integrations. The training and domestication of animals such as the dog may have
had a beginning in this period, especially among the lower types of men. Also
there may have been some improvement in certain types of fruits due to
anthropoid or human manipulation. But it is certain that such improvements or
domestication were not purposive or even conceptualized. If the dog was
domesticated he did it himself by fallowing human savages who afforded him
scraps of food and leadership. If fruits were selected, it must have been
because animals feeding upon them accidentally dropped the seeds in fer-

(
189) -tile cleared places and then further spread the best seedlings equally
unintentionally. Such control over selection and domestication is so negative
that it scarcely differs from natural selection. And yet no one can draw a
definite line of distinction that is not artificial and arbitrary between
such inventive activities and those of a later date. The truth is that all
culture is as continuous as is the evolution of living forms itself.

If we fail to recognize this fact it is because we are still under the
dominance of cataclysmic theories of interpretation, which are reinforced by the
psychological necessity of placing limits to the range of our vision. We see
things from points of view because the organism is built and located that way,
and because it is necessary to fixate the objective field subject to sensory and
perceptual exploration in order to differentiate objects and to use them as
points of orientation. We think in terms of comparisons. Hence we must have
stages and a beginning of all things, individually and collectively. We lack the
facility to see things continuously and yet to see the parts of the moving
panorama in proportion without points of fixation, which by the very fact of
their being points of fixation or at which the attention is arrested also become
means of distortion. One of the main potential services of a scheme or
classification of the factors in cultural development should be so to film the
developmental process that we can see it more continuously and with less
distortion. Another function should be to enable us to see it more
comprehensively and compositely.

The environment which bears upon the anthropoid and early human types is
still predominantly natural in the traditional sense of that world, but, thanks
to the rudimentary inventive processes already outlined, there is some
modification of these environments in the direction of the physico-social and
the bio-social. The very tendency for the dominant organic types to function
more effectively in collective behavior represents a significant increase in the
biosocial environment. Any regimentation of living organisms must be regarded as
a contribution to the bio-social environment (5, g). There are perhaps also
suggestions of the psycho-social environment. While traditions and conventions
have not arisen and are not transmissible as concepts in consciousness, the
crude behavior

(
190) significance of cries and gestures apparently does stick in the memory
sufficiently long to make responses dependent on such elementary language
recognition continuous throughout connected periods of time and considerable
areas. Language is the essential foundation and carrier of the psycho-social
environment, and there is perhaps now sufficient evidence of language to suggest
the approach of a psycho-social environment.

Something that looks like the beginnings of organized society also appears.
The instinctive collective responses of earlier stages begin to be supplemented
by group responses based on acquired adjustment patterns. But group behavior can
as yet scarcely be said to be purposive. It merely arises as the coadaptive
responses of a number of individuals whose behavior has been conditioned to the
same stimuli sources. And the range of these coadaptive responses is no wider
than the food, fear, and sex impulses of the organism compel it to be.

IV. When the anthropoid type becomes truly human the neuro-psychic technique
of adults has been organized on a habit basis. Language develops into the verbal
form, so that images become definite and highly communicable through
verbalization. Gesture language also develops in efficiency as an aid to
communication, partly because of the stimulus given it by verbal language and
partly because of the greater carrying power of the more highly organized
neuro-psychic technique. The biological differentiation of brain structure
continues throughout the early human period known as "lower savagery," possibly
even until the cultural stage known as "barbarism" is reached. This fact makes
possible a constant growth in the power of the organism to transfer habit
modifications from overt trial-and-error adjustment patterns to internal
initiation and organization. More and more the total overt response is inhibited
and delayed in complicated and new adjustment situations and the organization of
the response patterns is transferred to the neuro-psychic processes preliminary
to overt response. The partial responses, or gesture and emotional expression,
which arose out of the early stages of inhibition of immediate overt responses,
still continue in this stage of enlargement of substitute and preliminary
neuro-psychic responses, but gradually verbal

(
191) communication becomes dominant and gestures, etc., become largely
supplementary to verbal communication and expression. They become, in
ordinary contacts, less violent and highly emotional just in proportion as the
language of the subject becomes more verbal and intellectual.

Vocal communication itself was probably of slow growth from the old emotional
cries of the preceding stage into the more intellectual verbal symbols which we
find at the beginning of the most ancient recorded civilizations. We lack space
for any detailed account of the growth of this chief instrument in cultural
development, but competent anthropologists have expressed their belief that
there was little if any speech, properly speaking, before the time of
Neanderthal man. Peoples very much more advanced than Neanderthal man have been
described as having a language extremely meager in verbal content or
intellectual connotations, and such languages have been reported to change their
verbal content to such a degree as to be practically unrecognizable within a
period of twenty years (31). The growth of verbal language, with an intellectual
content, undoubtedly developed because of the growing complexity of the
environment, especially of the physico-social and psycho-social environments,
which had in turn been differentiated by the greater development of the
forebrain. The hands also had about completed their transformation into
culturally manipulative instruments which served to transform the physical
environment into physical inventions. This transformation, under the guidance of
the superior forebrain, served so to complicate the physical environment alone,
that a new language mechanism for purposes of communicating behavior patterns in
co-operative and coadaptive adjustments to the physical environments became
necessary. The whole content of the communication of such behavior patterns
necessary to coadaptive and co-operative adjustments could no longer be carried
by gesture mechanisms, holophrastic cries, and other emotional expressions.

The vocalizing apparatus itself was evolving through this period. It is
difficult to determine what changes may have taken place in the vocal cords
themselves, but the mouth, which is the chief molder of words, was slowly
evolving into an apparatus better

(
192) adapted to such a function. Also the chin, said to be necessary for the
attachment of certain muscles controlling the tongue and lips in word formation,
appeared sometime in this period. These surface structural changes, together
with the more complete differentiation of the brain, making possible a higher
degree of internal association and integration of behavior patterns, gave birth
to verbal language and thence to more or less voluminous development of the
psycho-social environment. The growth of language and the more numerous and more
complex types of adjustments which it made possible, with the resulting
complexity of the social environments of all types, reacted back upon the
development of the forebrain by selecting variations or mutations toward greater
size and complexity in this organ. The whole process of development of internal
structure, of environment, and of language was of course one of close
interdependence. Growth of one factor reacted back upon the growth of other
factors. And this is also true of all of the factors involved in the
cultural-development process.

Both as result and as cause of verbal-language development, abstract
conceptual thinking appeared and developed. Perceptions, as instruments in
conceptual thinking, also became well defined and objectified as the result of
verbalization. If we conceive of thinking in the behavioristic sense as
functional behavior of the organism in adjustment situations, we may say that
this functional adjustment behavior now came to be largely transferred from
external or overt responses to internal or neuro-psychic responses. These inner
or neuro-psychic patterns began to accumulate as recall processes which were
reproduced in consciousness in symbolic verbal form. Thus the time element in
adjustment, which was dominant in overt trial-and-error adjustment, came to be
largely eliminated. The space limitation also became less evident through this
process of symbolic inner storage and recall. Patterns of adjustment behavior
for various places, circumstances, and times came to be closely juxtaposed in
their symbolic form in the neuropsychic organization. As a result, a behavior
plan adapted to highly complex situations could be worked out internally, or by
the process of abstract conceptual thinking, upon the presentation of
representative stimuli from the environment (either immediate or

(
193) distant in time and space) to which the adjustment must occur. This
internal adjustment obviated the necessity of using the overt trial-and-error
method as well as the random expenditure of time and energy which such an
adjustment requires. The trial-and-error process of course remained, but it was
transferred from overt or neuro-muscular patterns to internal or neuro-psychic
patterns. If it occurred in consciousness it was verbal and logical. Such
transference of adjustment integration 'to internal behavior processes is of the
very greatest significance to man in mastering his environment, or in adjusting
himself to it. The increased complexity of the environment and the growing needs
of the organism make such a time- and energy-saving method of adjustment
necessary. Likewise they create the structural capacity for it and the growth of
the technique of verbal language perfects it.

Growing complexity of environment and increasing need for multifarious
adjustment due to increased complexity of adjustment also make co-operative
adjustment to environment imperative. This co-operative adjustment, which
earlier grew out of the coadaptive adjustment of proximate organisms, called
forth and compelled the specialization of verbal language as a means to greater
effectiveness in co-operative adjustment. But verbal language serves not only to
facilitate co-operative adjustment of complex organisms to a highly complex
environment; it also serves to shorten the process of adaptation and control in
adjustment by providing a logical method of internal selection and organization
of behavior to take the place increasingly of the time- and energy-consuming
overt trial-and-error adjustments. Furthermore, it brings greater accuracy into
the adjustment process because it is able to present practically simultaneously
in symbolic form all of the conditions of adjustment instead of compelling the
organism to meet them serially as in overt trial-and-error adjustment, where
each step may have disproportionate or illogical influence in determining an
arrest of adjustment. Civilization could never have come about without such an
internal mechanism facilitated by abstract language presentation.

But abstract and logical thinking is still very simple in this stage relative
to what it has become in our age. There is no science,

(
193) properly speaking. There are no systems of rational logic
designed especially to separate truth from error, and the symbols for expressing
quantitative relationships are still very simple and poorly conditioned.
Thinking is for the most part qualitative rather than quantitative. The analogue
of scientific method of control is magic. It is based on the theory of direct
will control, or fiatistic causation without intermediate mechanical causal
processes. It, like science in the next stage, grows out of empirical
observation, but apparent causal relationships are not tested and checked by
refined methods of observation. Consequently an erroneous philosophy and system
of controls grew out of the theory and logic of magic which has obsessed and
oppressed the world even into our own times and which science has scarcely been
able to overturn.

Thinking was still primarily with regard to immediate problems, although
there was now an apparatus for projecting behavior adjustments into
environmental situations distant both in time and space. The difficulty in the
way of projective thinking was the lack of comparative data to give perspective
in regard to adjustments projected either into the past or the future.
Consequently, the ends or objectives of adjustment were set almost wholly in the
present. There was little planning for the future beyond the lifetime of a
single generation. Most permanent structures and organizations seem to have been
planned as a monument to contemporaneous glory rather than as a preparation for
future efficiency. But, while the future was not adequately foreseen, the
present was viewed with much more completeness and in greater unity than ever
before.

Inventions were much more numerous in this stage and, although still
empirical, they were much more complex. They were no longer exclusively
accidental, but were not infrequently worked out consciously as more effective
adjustments of the organism and of the group to their environments. Physical
inventions marched a long way through this period of savagery and early
barbarism. Weapons, tools, aids to transportation and communication, clothing,
dwellings, even towns, methods of agriculture and zoöculture, the domestication
of roots, fruits, grains, and animals, and the use of animals as means of
transportation and power sources were the chief lines of physical invention.
Social inventions also multiplied

(
194) in the form of group organization, leadership, methods of making war,
rituals, cults, bodies of tradition, even cosmologies and crude philosophies.
Method inventions were represented in the intricate processes of magic and
traditional systems of ethics as well as in the various physical technologies in
so far as they had been developed.

The environments were transformed accordingly in response to these inventive
processes. For the first time the physico-social and the bio-social environments
began to encroach seriously upon the natural environments and to stand as a sort
of buffer between the animal type (man) and nature. Nature's directness and
severity were largely mitigated by these new types of environment created by the
more complex adjustment behavior of man reacting back upon nature and the
derived social environments. Also for the first time the psycho-social
environment assumed definite form and appreciable volume. This environment
always depends upon language, primarily verbal language, content, and in this
stage its verbal content was vocal. Traditions sanctioning and enforcing and
perpetuating customs, conventions, beliefs, mores, systems of social
organization, and theories of magic and of the supernatural were handed down
from mouth to mouth and passed on from one person to another over wide areas.
The psycho-social environment came to dominate the inventive processes and thus
to assume direction over the physico-social and bio-social environments and to
expand them as buffers against nature. All of these increasingly complex
environments of course reacted back upon the thinking process and stimulated the
evolution of neuro-psychic technique of a higher order and the process of
invention.

It was in this stage of development that consciously planned and developed
social organizations developed out of the embryonic forms which preceded.
Collective forms were not, as some writers looking at society from this end of
the process have said, the product of conscious interaction only. It has long
been known that social organization occurs on the basis of instinctive
adjustment even among low types of animals (26, 48). Also, there is an analogous
type of interdependence among plants (29). The higher degree of development of
the collective behavior, extending even to a re-

(
195) -markable degree of division of function and a corresponding
specialization of form, among the ants and bees is proverbial (28, 48). Some
sort of grouping on the basis of similar response to the same or similar
stimulus is common among the lowest types of animals. Giddings takes this
initial similarity of response to similar stimuli as the starting-point in the
development of his "consciousness of kind" (17) ; and Espinas (16), observing
the co-ordinations of functions which developed from it, was led rightly to
assume that animal societies began in a type of adjustment that was far lower
than the human. Here again, as we observed in connection with language and
invention, there is no justification for the old exclusively introspective
criterion which would find the beginnings of these processes only at the point
at which man becomes aware of them or manifests conscious intention regarding
them. It has remained for the behaviorists to discover that the process is a
continuous one from the earliest periods of development and that they change
primarily in complexity and toward indirectness of adjustment rather than in
kind. Watson (45, 46) has observed this fact with regard to language, and Weiss
(47) has raised the question if animals below man do not use their
conventionalized responses as the basis of non-introspective generalization. In
attempting to give an account of the psycho-social processes of invention (10),I
found it impossible on an introspective basis to make any distinction between
inventive and preinventive adjustment at the lower human borderline (itself
apparently mythical), as had been the custom of earlier writers.

The schools (of fishes), the flocks, and the packs and herds, the most common
forms of groupings found among the vertebrates below man, had been supplemented
in the lowest human stage of development by a large number of specialized forms
of collective response. These forms of collective response constituted at once
inventions and environment. They were of course dependent upon the growing
specialization of language for their increasing differentiation. The coming of
verbal vocal language, which made possible the conveying of some sort of
conventionalized intellectual content in words to serve as stimuli to
effectively conditioned behavior at a

(
196) considerable distance or at a much later time, widened the group beyond
the face-to-face contact limitations. Tribes and confederacies of nations arose,
and within these a high degree of specialization of leadership, ritualization,
and other forms of customary co-operative behavior arose. Institutions began to
appear, and in the period called "barbarism" reached a high degree of
traditional and customary organization. As a result, man's domestic, religious,
economic, and political life became fairly highly complex and, unfortunately as
well as fortunately, highly organized and fixed. His empirical social
inventions, like the physical ones which aided in their integration, had by the
end of this period developed in complexity to the point where crude projective
invention was taking place. Man was beginning to plan his collective behavior
beforehand, but without any recognized principles of science to guide him or to
sanction the inventions after they were made. Consequently, he usually justified
changes in the social organization or collective behavior by invoking a
revelation (12). The era of method inventions had not yet risen above the
theological form of explanatory thinking (6). These new social organizations
also, of course, constituted a tremendous growth in the content of the social
environments, both bio-social and psycho-social, and they rested upon a
physico-social environment. As environment they reacted back upon the process of
adjustment with the result that they increased the volume of thinking adjustment
or of invention and thus, by increasing the load of the internal or
neuro-psychic organization beyond what it could bear, initiated the final or
present stage of adjustment of the basis of externally stored and accumulated
symbols (11).

V. In this last stage civilization becomes literate. The vocal verbal
symbols, already conditioned to types of inner adjustment behavior and to total
overt adjustment responses, are further conditioned to written symbols, which
thereby acquire the power of initiating and controlling much more complex and
abstract and continuous series of behavior than can be controlled by vocal
language. I have endeavored elsewhere (8, 9, 11 ) to summarize the superior
adjustment values of written language and will not repeat

(
198) the argument here. This is the stage of animal development in which
written (latterly printed) language becomes dominant as a control medium.
In this connection, as in all others, it is not possible to say when writing
began. All physical inventions are in a sense forms of writing, because they
become symbolic controls for the mediation of adjustment responses. Notched
sticks, knotted cords, laying the foundations of buildings in certain forms,
shaping altars or pottery in prescribed ways, designs on pottery, weapons,
ornaments, mutilations of the body, even the ornaments and clothing worn, may be
considered as forms of writing usually less cornplex and purposive than the
pictograph. More purposive and projective, in the field of invention, is the
alphabet, systems of hand-writing, of grammar, printing, and dictionaries.

Adjustment has become infinitely complex among us, and it is constantly
changing. It is not possible, therefore, to indicate accurately and fully the
causal interrelationships among cultural development processes. Hence, not all
of the story is told by saying that the load of adjustment referred to above
forced the utilization of external storage of symbolic conditioners of the inner
behavior mechanisms. The behavior consequences of this external storage of
conventionalized stimuli were unlimited and unpredictable. Tradition, which was
the collective analogue of memory or internal storage, began to be secondary to
external storage in writing and print, and custom, which was the "overhead"
organization of habit in the preceding stage, now began to give way to the more
accurate and flexible external supervision of continuity in collective response
exercised by the written document and the printed page. Ritual, imbedded in
emotional sanction, was destined to become secondary to rational acceptance, and
with the coming of science rational adjustment began to supplement authority.
Not that authority cannot lurk within written scrolls and printed pages—a fact
which searchers for "truth" (a tern which itself has learned to face to the
future and away from the past) know only too well. But the days of greatest
authority in the written document were those in which the traditions were merely
copied into permanent records. Since then laboratories and statistical
generalizations have in some

(
199) degree supplanted oracles and mystical revelations, with the result
that the printed page and the professional journal have become the symbol of the
newest discoveries in adjustment-behavior technique. Even the language of art
has latterly tended to become objective and non-authoritarian.

Science has evolved for itself special languages, not for the sake of secrecy
(although they do in a measure afford this protection in a too-little-tolerant
age), but in order to provide means of condensed and accurate expression. The
traditional and customary languages are of course legible to all scientific
workers, because they were reared in these media of communication.
Mathematics is a general scientific language common to all of the special
sciences. But physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, the social sciences, have
severally their own languages, with their dependent written dialects. But these
languages are so similar that they may all be mastered by a single individual.
The mastery of their content is a more difficult matter. While the individual as
a member of the numerous groups or forms of collective behavior in which he must
participate still uses, or at least responds to, all of the old language
forms—vocal verbal language in particular and constantly, and also to
holophrastic vocal (as in music), gesture, pantomime, etc. —the scientist who
would invent new forms of collective or individual behavior (social and method
inventions) or physical aids to adjustment (physical inventions) must employ the
more precise and accurate symbols of his scientific languages. It is through
these that the projective process of inventive thinking takes place.

Thinking has become extremely complex and abstract among the professional
inventors or thinkers of our time. This is so much the case that the masses of
the people who still think largely in the old emotional and traditional
illogical forms of language are largely out of touch with the leaders of
thought. We have invented, partly empirically and partly projectively, an
elaborate system of education designed to bring the thought of the masses as
nearly as possible within reach of the content and accuracy of the intellectual
leaders. But it is by no means as yet working with perfect success. Perhaps the
most significant social invention of our age is our col-

(
200) -lectively supported system of research with its avowed purpose of
producing primarily new and more complicated method inventions. It is largely
because of this research system that the inventors have so outdistanced the
masses in their thinking that not even our schools, with their teaching of the
languages as well as of the content of science, have been able always to
keep them in effective intellectual contact.

The masses have profited so much from the new inventive processes that they
are now able to rule and even
to determine the limits to which the scientific leaders shall push the
inventive process. Perhaps long ago they would have checked their activities
where they came in conflict with custom and tradition if the scientists had not
provided them with so many material comforts. There is not space even to
mention the tremendous contributions of invention to our modern civilization.
All modern industry is founded on it, and industry in turn has made possible the
support of investigations which have led to a reasonable progress in social
invention and in the creation of the multitude of sciences in the last two
centuries, themselves the great storehouses of method inventions.

But the next great general step in invention must be in the direction of the
perfection and expansion of social organization (social inventions) comparable
to that of the physical inventions in the inorganic and organic worlds during
the past century. Already we have begun to apply the method of projective
invention to the construction of efficient governmental organizations, national,
state, and municipal, to the application of psychological and sociological
science to educative processes and organization, to the conduct and control of
industry, to systems of public-health administration, and to scores of other
phases of complex collective living and acting. It is not only in the creation
of new or better integrated groups that the method of projective invention in
social life has been applied, but also to the development of administrative
systems and of the data and principles of the social sciences themselves. Along
with these have been invented great and surprisingly effective communicating
systems. The modern newspaper and weekly and monthly magazines, with their
publics of hundreds of

(
201) thousands, even millions, of readers, are social inventions of the
greatest complexity. Physical inventions, such as the telegraph, telephone, and
radio, bring in their wake new types or complexities of social relationships and
require the invention of new social controls or administrative systems to
prevent them from upsetting the balance of the social order, or perhaps they
cause the social system to be organized on a higher level because of this
complexity.

Such inventions have profoundly modified the character of the social
environments and the interrelationships which exist among them. The
physico-social and the bio-social environments have increased in importance
until they stand almost completely between most men and the natural
environments. Even the agricultural and other populations engaged in the
extractive industries, who come most closely in contact with nature, have the
strenuousness of that contact mollified by all sorts of modern inventions in the
nature of tools, machines, improvements in living conditions, and protective
devices in labor. The city-dweller has almost no direct contact with unmodified
nature left to him, even for aesthetic purposes. Millions of our population
scarcely know how their food and clothing are produced, and our industrial
system, once organized in local units on the basis of extractive production, is
now organized abstractly on a wide scale from the standpoint of capitalistic
exploitation. All social organization is, as a matter of fact, being transferred
from the local or primary and face-to-face unit to the abstract or derivative
overhead type (9).

This of course means that the process of projective invention has created for
us a new type of social world which is as abstract and as far removed from
direct contact with nature as the new inventive process itself is removed from
the old technique of overt habit adjustment to nature. The psycho-social
environment constructed from the written document and code and treatise, from
the daily paper and magazine, and from the vocalization of the radio and
telephone (the last being powerful vocal-control elements in the psycho-social
environment) now dominates our collective life. "Talk," as Bagehot (2) called
it, is not to be ignored, but it can no longer compete with the swifter means of
communication in

(
202) making up the minds of the masses of the people. Tradition is now
relatively unimportant as a psycho-social environmental control, even among the
masses, and convention is everything among them. Fad, fashion, and craze follow
one another in rapid succession. But perhaps what has been lost in stability in
the new and dominant type of the psycho-social environment has been made up, in
part at least, in dependableness. The greatest difficulty which we now have to
face in controlling the content of the psycho-social environment which controls
us is to prevent it from being distorted by commercialized or group-interest
propaganda and for private profit. This is a real problem which grows with the
increased complexity of the psycho-social environment (39). The average
individual is not able to test the value of all of the propaganda which reaches
him without a more effective training in the data and principles of science than
he now possesses. And besides, the process of judgment, even with information,
is not always capable of standing out against the insidious appeal and
suggestions of propaganda.

This fact brings us face to face with perhaps the greatest weakness of this
new phase of cultural development. Our inner biological structure apparently has
not changed during the whole of the last period. What structural changes have
occurred are evidently acquired and are induced from the external pressures of
the environment, especially of the psycho-social environment. Outside of the
acquisition of neuro-psychic techniques or organizations these are not
particularly important. The latter are, however, significant, for, together with
their symbolization and external storage in the psycho-social environment, they
constitute the body of our non-material culture or civilization. Other
structural changes are external to our neurological and physiological
organizations, but they constitute invaluable aids to the effective operation of
our senses and generalizing processes. Those physical inventions which,
like the microscope and telescope, telephone and radio, extend the range of the
senses, and those physical inventions based upon method inventions, such as
calculating machines, that aid the generalizing faculties, or the method
inventions and social inventions, such as mathematics, statistics, laboratories,
and research institutions, which also promote greater efficiency in
generalization,

(
203) have all added to the effectiveness of our adjustment responses to
environment. They have also greatly complicated them.

But, on the other hand, our physiology is essentially the same and our neural
equipment has not expanded. In spite of all of the aids which internal
organization under environmental pressures and the extension of our senses and
generalizing methods by means of mechanical and social and method inventions
have brought to us, we still operate with the same original biological
equipment. We are by no means abstract intellectual machines, but are still
largely creatures of emotion, in spite of all of the protective and adjusting
devices just mentioned. Consequently, our judgments are not always dependable,
especially in the face of adroitly manipulated suggestive appeals to emotion.

But our projection of objectives in adjustment has greatly improved. We now
include a considerable projection of the present into the future in
making our plans for adjustment. Also, and even more important for rational
control, we include future generations and peoples at a great distance in our
projected plans for adjustment. We are building up a projected science of the
future, slowly but with some apparent validity, to guide us in making just such
adjustments. That is what the introduction of courses in social progress (when
the content of these is not merely historical retrospection) into our university
curricula means. We are attempting to get some perspective upon the future and
the conditions of effective adjustment of man to his world in the future in
order that we may make a reasonable compromise in adapting the present
adjustment to future needs. Such an insight into the future and our collective
behavior with reference to it involve a more complex use of the process of
projective invention than has ever before been attempted. Men are more concerned
with the future of mankind on this earth than ever before. The
presentation of such a schematic correlation of the factors mutually responsive
in the process of the evolution of adjustments of man to nature in the past and
present—however sketchy and inadequate it may be—may possibly assist somewhat in
affording such perspective. At least, it is always helpful to see the adjustment
process as nearly as a whole as is possible.

45. ———, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,
chaps. viii, ix.

46.———, "The Place of Kinaesthetic, Visceral and Laryngeal
Organization in Thinking," Psy. Rev., XXXI, 339-47.

47.Weiss, A. P., "Behaviorism and Behavior," ibid., pp. 118-4g.

48.Wheeler, W. M., Social Life among the Insects (1022).

Notes

Figures in parentheses refer to Bibliography at end of article.

An article by H. H. Bawden (3) attempts to cover a portion of the same
field in a somewhat similar manner. The reader should refer to Dr. Bawden's
article for supplementary material. See also Huxley (24)

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